meeting9

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NBDC Team Meeting

11 October 2012
15:00 - 17:00
ILRI Addis Ababa (Room 54)

Agenda


15:00
- management and coordination update - ALAN and SIMON
- reporting to CPWF, 6-montly reporting, MSC stories, others? - SIMON
- plans for the NBDC 'Planning Workshop ' to be held in Addis 14-15 November (TBC)
- quick round of individual updates on NBDC activities
16:45: NBDC Highlight (Catherine on GIS Toolkit)

See action points at bottom of this page.

Participants:
  • Physically: Peter Ballantyne (chair), Simon Langan, Alan Duncan, Beth Cullen, Mulugeta Habtemichael, Aberra Adie, Catherine Grasham, Kathryn Snyder, Gerba Leta, Kees Swaans, Kebebe Ergano, Charlotte McAllister, Catherine Pfeifer, Zelalem Lema, Yenenesh Abebe.
  • Virtually: Amanda Harding, Don Peden, Pamela Pali, Fergus Sinclair, Jane Gitau.

Key discussion points

Management and coordination update:
  • Tilahun's job divided among: Alan/Simon to look after science, Peter/Ewen for communication and help Kees with National platform, Kees is developing ToR for an Ethiopian to help, Doug Merrey to take care of reporting for NBDC. Tim Williams and Amanda Harding to help feed into the wider CPWF programme.
  • Q: What is planned for M&E? Work with Tonya?
  • A: Tonya is indeed the first point of contact for M&E for assistance and guidance. Pamela to work with Simon and Alan for scientific coordination.
  • For gender Pamela will be working with Amy and Amanda.
  • For reporting, it will be a joint exercise between Alan and Simon - copy both in for those reporting emails.

Reporting to CPWF:
  • Report expected tomorrow but asking delay related to transition. We can talk about this. Final date for technical report 19 October (possibly flexible). Financial report needs to be handed in by 15 October - informs budgeting for 2013.
  • MSC stories: we delay until we hear progress from each of the N projects. We need a mechanism to do this. We can harvest some ideas fin a half-day writeshop for these MSC stories. MSC was a requirement from Boru and Sophie. Last time people did not like stories. We could collect these stories in an adapted process. What is the frequency of stories and shouldn't partners collect stories? This time around we should collect data from project stakeholders. From today's round of news we can tease out most striking aspects and have a short writeshop process to tease out stories. An delivering her report next week, Simon in charge of N2, Alan in charge of N5. Doug Merry could play a role in this. We need financial information about platforms.

Plans for NBDC planning workshop:
  • Planning:
    • We need a smaller planning meeting to look at end of next year and derive back what can be delivered etc.
    • Dates: 15-16 Nov but clashes with GIS training from N3. Then again Doug Merrey around that week.
    • Plus an external (stakeholder) one Feb 20-21, 2013
  • Our external partners will not look at N-projects but about NBDC. We have to emphasize integration across the project.
  • Kees, Ewen, Zelalem, Pamela, Doug Merrey to coordinate the planning of that workshop: design agenda, contact people to lead parts of the agenda, run it...
  • Jane Gitau to help for January-February meeting (20-21 Feb)
  • External stakeholder meeting: disseminate outputs, share plans, discuss exit strategy and getting views from partners about IPs, capacity building etc. - to bring together with a National Platform meeting. This should be seized as an opportunity to get inputs from partners about relevance of NBDC and of national platform before planning for exit strategy.

Individual updates:
  • Fergus: Tidying up info on the 3 sites relating to 3 different types of activities. Looking at local K, scoping study, market survey of 3 products - collating that info to relate it to agroforestry options. Tracked down Tesfay Sida to finalize that work. Fergus thought that data on land cover were sent through but Fergus needs to follow up. AfSIS sentinel sites - sampling done. Ground-truthing pending.
  • Peter:
  • Pamela: 2 activities planned: MSC survey and KAP survey (developing tools but decided to complex and needs a less involved approach) + gender audit and consulted PGI team to get help on collecting some of that info. Hopes to do that work around 15-16 Nov with team in Addis and could thus build some activities around the meeting with stakeholders. Will circulate this work to Alan and then all members later. Hopes to have data collected in mid Nov. For MSC will work on the process and consult internally
  • Don: Working with Kees on RIU project and in Feb might come over to include that work into the NBDC process - will discuss this further with Kees. Also wrote an IWMI-ILRI book based on CPWF work in phase 1, Don played an editorial role there. Official book launch in November. Some of it should be useful for the NBDC.
  • Charlotte: 2 new staff (Borlaug fellow, lecturer at Bahar Dar Uni, working on ?? + post-doc Randall Ritzema from Davis looking at component integration). Activity update: WEAP is calibrated etc. Water modelling transferred to Davis. Crop model data covered for land and crop productivity data from 2011 all processed, ditto with sediment data. All data from livestock students also. Next thing: ?? which will integrate crop, livestock productivity with land use. On policy work, Hailemichael started working on policy element (hopefully due late December). This will be a review of which policy options apply at what scale. We also did a policy review for Africa RISING which used this as background. Unclear how to integrate this with wider modelling work. Is this really necessary? There should be scope to make the policy review work with modelling. It might be good to have a seminar on modelling & quantitative work.
  • Simon: N2 component. First year of data back from meteorological / soil / flow / ?? data. During that period we used catchment coordinators and observers to go twice / day to observe water levels. We have 500 sediment samples from the rivers to give us an idea of soil quality. Has to analyze this with ILRI. Berhanu developing SWAT model for 3 sentinel sites and working with Emily Schmidt (IFPRI) to combine livelihood/hh data from a few years ago. Making good progress.
  • Katherine: On livelihoods component: 2 students from Emory Uni in Int'l Dev't were N2 interns and worked on data/survey from N3 to look specifically at (non-)adoption by HHs and find out about specific water management issues. Good reports in. We have also 3 more in-depth livelihoods analyses from consultants for the 3 sites. Now we have a good baseline together with the N2 baseline from 2 years ago. Now working on integrating qual and quant data with Beth and Emily.
  • Beth: IP work. Innovation funds transferred to each platform. Pilot in progress around fodder issues. Some problems with implementation and Zelalem went to the sites to follow that. Working on devolving responsibilities for platform facilitation and hoping to bring them in AA to train + focus on specific activities around pilot ?? ODI equity/political economy work using IPs as starting point to look at impact that these interventions could have. Could feed into an M&E strategy. Quite a lot of work planned for that. Possibly using photo stories for cross-site sharing. Berhanu presenting hydrological work at the platform. Thinking about working with AfroMaison to scale issues and strategy dev't looking at happy strategies, wat-a-game etc. to scale platforms, PV work... We've done PV in Fogera to increase community representation of issues. Ended in interesting issues about power dynamics, termites. Catchment coordinators will get cameras.
  • Kebebe: Busy with survey. N3 survey completed in May-June, data entered and data cleaning now at advanced stage. Presented brief outcomes at Ethio rainwater harvesting association last week. A lot of work due still. Presentation should go to Slideshare. Busy with other papers for PhD -under review- and now going back to data cleaning and generating important insights.
  • Catherine: N3 update: we are closing down. An has requested a no-cost extension. There was never a formal signature about the extension. Some budget transferred to N5? This was discussed between An and Tilahun.
  • Kees: National platform meeting in June combined with Africa RISING/ICRAF. Didn't work very well. Have to do this differently. We are recruiting a consultant to lead efforts on national platform so Kees can focus on N5 research. Hoping to share ToR with Alan / Simon. The person should be able to work with TWGs too. We need to see how we can link local platforms with national platform. In terms of research, groups need to be pushed e.g. innovation work. Kees talked to Catherine about tech innovation and that will build lessons learnt for N3. Some research institutes happy to hear about that. Final issue: CPWF message to look at institutional histories. Kees interested in taking this up (what lessons learnt, outcomes etc.) which relates to planning meeting. Kees suggests to take this to next year - implications for cross-basin linkages?
  • Ewen: Comms document (4-5 page doc) following comms meetings from May 2012. CPWF online documentation and learning meeting series ongoing and should federate all comms/learning/monitoring efforts together. For the second online meeting (30 October), all N-project leaders should come up with a tentative idea about upcoming publications and outputs.

AOB:
  • SCIP proposal not going through.
  • Thematic meeting every second month - with round of news or not.

Key decisions

  • M&E point of contact to work with Pamela is Tonya Harding (guidance) as well as Alan Duncan (reporting to him before Alan/Simon report to Amanda and the management team).
  • Reporting in the NBDC team to be done to Simon & Alan;
  • Communication: email Ewen and only for very important emails copy Peter in - you can yammer us both.

Action points

  • Simon to get back to missing participants to find out why they did not participate (An, Josie, );
  • Ewen to collect Skype ID from all virtual participants;
  • Alan/Simon to work on financial report NBDC 15 October and technical report 19 October for N2-N5 with help by Charlotte (N4) and An (N3) and to develop an overall NBDC report (summary + additional take about programmatic change - there is a template that Pamela can dig out for Alan/Simon);
  • Pamela to share monitoring template with Alan/Simon and to introduce them to the M&E site;
  • (DONE) Pamela to plan a process to collect (MSC) stories of change based on inputs from this round of news;
  • (IN PROGRESS) Kees, Ewen, Zelalem, Doug Merrey, Pamela to coordinate planning of the workshop with Alan/Simon.
  • Everyone to pencil in 20-21 Feb. for the external stakeholder meeting + National platform meeting.
  • Fergus to brief and involve Kiros in NBDC meetings.
  • Charlotte, Catherine and Alan to discuss what to do about integrating policy review with modelling work.
  • Charlotte to plan a seminar for January-Feb 2013.
  • Simon, An and Amanda to discuss N3 budget issues and extension.
  • (DONE) Kees to share ToR for national platform coordinator with Alan and Simon.
  • (DONE) Ewen to set meetings every month every second Thursday 3-5pm.
  • Ewen to discuss thematic meetings with Simon/Alan.
  • Kebebe to arrange to put last week's presentation on Slideshare
  • All N-project leaders to come up with tentative list of outputs/publications by 25 October 2012 to feed into the CPWF learning and documentation project (3 online meetings to take stock of plans and develop plans across basins).